Because the poll was expanded to include other art forms this year, I've increased the size of the list to 400. The list takes in films, t.v. shows, music, novels, short stories, comics and games. First entry will be up soon, can any discussion go in the existing thread

Another of those wonderful Amicus anthologies, it's all too easy to get the actual films and titles confused, this is the one where The Cush' plays the owner of the antiques shop Temptations Ltd in the wrap-around story, second only to Tales... for the title of the greatest Amicus anthology. Cushing is cheated or stolen from in the wrap-around story and then we get to see the punishment that each thief has to suffer. The first tale, The Gate Crasher, sees David Warner buying an antique mirror and becoming possessed by a murderous spirit. I actually was introduced to this film at a very early age thanks to my older brother deciding I needed to see this gruesome story during a late night t.v. screening. Thanks, bro'. Basically a homage to the haunted mirror segment from the earlier Dead of Night, this ups the blood and remains one of the most memorable entries in anthology films. The second has one of the strongest casts of any of these stories, Ian Bannen is stuck in a miserable marriage to Diana Dors. He steals a medal he's not entitled to and meets a real service man, match-seller Donald Pleasence. He soon begins an affair with Pleasence's daughter, Angela, and soon discovers she really wants him out of his marriage. In the third story, Ian Carmichael finds his life plagued by an invisible demon that's come to sit on his shoulder, before the finale, and possibly best story of the bunch, 'The Door', where Ian Oglivy finds an antique door can lead him to a sinister new dimension. Cushing is as fantastic as always, it's not disrespect to say that the great man made a lot of crap in his time, but even in his worst films he always came across as one of the most dedicated actors imaginable, willing to commit himself to anything the script would ask. So it's a delight to see him in a film like this that really suits his talents. This is intelligent, funny and scary, everyone should see it.

by Alvin Schwartz, Illustrator: Stephen Gammell 1981 Short Story Collection

Last Year's Position: New Entry

Aimed at children, Schwartz's collection of folk stories and urban legends achieved notoriety in America when it became one of the most challenged books in school libraries. Regarded as highly for their illustrations as their stories, a recent series of reprints came under fire for replacing the original imagery.

It's difficult to know exactly how to classify Candle Cove. It's essentially a short story designed to look like a series of message board posts about a little remembered t.v. show called Candle Cove, but people's memories of the show begin to get a little disturbing. Read it for yourself and find out.

Sleazy 70s greatness here. During the preparations for her first communion service, Karen (A very young Brooke Shields) and her family visit her priest, who gives her a gift of a crucifix. Karen's 12 year old sister, Alice (Paula Sheppard) is, well, kinda creepy. She's withdrawn, jealous of the young Karen, and she even has her own slasher killer fashion choice - the school issue yellow raincoat and creepy mask. On the day of the communion, a figure in a mask and raincoat grabs Karen and strangles her before stuffing her in a bench, stealing her crucifix, and setting her on fire. Suspicion soon falls on Alice, mainly from her aunt who has always loathed her. Alice suffers through an attempt molestation by her landlord before her aunt is attacked and stabbed by a masked figure. Alice is blamed and a psychiatrist labels her as schizophrenic, but is she really the killer?

The film was rereleased when Shields become a star and sold on her involvement. The first review I ever read of the film even claimed she was playing the disturbed Alice. So no doubt fans of Shields were disappointment with her brief involvement in the film, the rest of us no doubt cheered at her swift exit. The true star, Sheppard, is sensational, she was closer to 20 while playing a 12 year and that maturity shows through in the performance. It's brilliant in its malevolence. She's a perfect punk girl for the era, pissed-off and ready to let people know it. The best supporting performance comes from Alphonso DeNoble as the grotesque and loathsome landlord.

It's one of the very best religious horror films ever made. The repression and guilt so often associated with Catholicism loom large over this film. The film is filled with images of Catholic life, and as the film progresses they become ever more sinister, and the unbending nature of Catholicism plays a large part in the events that occur. Basically an American giallo. The influence of the Italian genre is especially evident in the attack scenes and some of the fantastic set-pieces.

It's a startling and shocking film and one that's ready to be rediscovered.

Those who think a film about bunny rabbits can't be traumatic obviously haven't been subjected to Watership Down. The 80s seemed to be the decade for parents thoughtlessly plopping their kid down in front of an animated film and not realising the horrors they would be subjected to - Watership Down, its equally disturbing companion piece, Plague Dogs, The Mouse and His Child, even When the Wind Blows for some. But then this is also the decade when parents would allow us to watch films like The Terminator or Nightmare on Elm Street without much of a fuss. They were happier times. Watership Down tells the story of a warren of bunnies who, following a psychic vision from one of the number predicting death and destruction, decide to leave their field to find a new place to live. The death and savagery in the film sent many of us into shock, a terror only deepened by the film's theme song, Bright Eyes.

The third entry in a loose trilogy about people becoming isolated in their apartments and becoming overwhelmed by their surroundings (Following Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby), The Tenant stars Polanski as Trelkovsky,a foreigner in France who moves into an apartment where the previous tenant attempted suicide. Becoming interested in the woman, Simone, he visits her in hospital and meets a friend of hers, but whatever he attemps he finds it impossible to fit in to the world around him. Trelkovsky comes to believe that his neighbours are engaged in a conspiracy to drive him to suicide by forcing the personality of the woman on him.

The Tenant was the first movie Polanski made after fleeing America on rape charges, is it a coincidence that he himself plays the title character? Trelkovsky is a ball of impotent, frustrated loathing driven to despair by his place in society, Polanski's character is an outsider in a strange country and he feels as if the world is against him, but it's just as likely he's a victim of his own paranoia. Polanski may not be the first choice of everyone for a leading man role, but he's perfect here, he understands Trelkovsky and all of his alienation and it's difficult to imagine a more professional actor doing the job as well. One of the film's greatest strengths is the cinematography from Sven Nykvist, creating haunting imagery from Trelkovsky's isolated apartment and from the faces of the neighbours who keep a constant watch on him, some of them fading Hollywood stars.

The Tenant is one of cinema's greatest paranoid fantasies. The fear of the other is a running theme in Polanski's work, no doubt inspired by the horrors he endured in his own life. Here the neighbours do everything they can to make Trelkovsky feel unwelcome and we feel his discomfort under their threatening gazes. The sense of urban paranoia and mental impairment, again themes that run through Polanski's work, are here turned almost blackly comic. If Repulsion was serious and psychological and Rosemary's Baby a more mainstream take on paranoia, here Polanski seems to be aiming for an entry in The Theatre Of The Absurd. The sense of dread becomes almost comical on several occasions, especially when Trelkovsky tries to become the woman everyone seems to want him to be. And if we take what we're shown at face value they do seem to want to trap him in Simone's life, but is what we're seeing ever real or is it simply more of Trelkovsky's delusions? There are people who feel that Trelkovsky is being taken over by the spirit of the dead girl, and there's certainly a case to be made for the concept of Simone's soul being transferred to Trelkovsky's body. Especially in the 'hospital scream' segment. Trelkovsky himself could be a fictional construct, a fantasy of Simone as she lies in her hospital bed. Or Trelkovsky himself could be hallucinating the whole thing, he's certainly suffering a loss of identity brought on by his isolation and his alienation could be bringing about a mental collapse. Polanski never really answers the question for us by giving us a definite truth, and the film is all the better for it.

Direct sequel to the original, the film follows heroine Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) after she's rushed to the hospital. Hot on her trail is the psychotic Michael Myers. Generally regarded as vastly inferior to the original, luckily Rob Zombie came along to show us that it could have been much worse.

The structure is the tale told by Louis (Brad Pitt) to journalist Daniel Malloy (Christian Slater) in modern day. Louis's tale starts 2 centuries before when he meets Lestat after a family tragedy and is eventually turned by him to a life he abhors. He tells of the difficulties in fitting in with vampire life and the obscenity of turning children into immortals, trapped in the body of a child no matter the maturity of the mind.

Based on Anne Rice's massive bestseller, Interview with a Vampire introduced the Vampire Lestat to the big screen, played by a blonde Tom Cruise. For him it provided something different from the normal heroic/action type fare he'd been starring in almost since his first couple of films. It also gave a career start to future Mary Jane, Kirsten Dunst.

Jordan has made a relatively faithful adaptation, following Louis's journey from Louisiana to France and back to the US but does seem to twist the film about to avoid any suggestion of homoerotica, even while keeping to the narrative. It is better than Queen of the Damned, the sequel of sorts.

The front of the DVD copy of Perfect Blue that I hired has, in big white font, a quote from Roger Corman - "If Alfred Hitchcock partnered with Walt Disney they'd make a film like this." This isn't really correct, a) because there's next-to-no Walt Disney in this (I get the feeling that was just Corman pigeonholing animation), and b) because he compared Kon to the wrong thriller director. Far from having a Hitchcockian vibe, Perfect Blue carries the rather more obvious imprint of David Lynch - the fever-dream second half, the heroine in peril, the blurring of reality and hallucination, the somewhat-grotesque supporting characters. In fact, if Mulholland Drive hadn't been released three years after Perfect Blue , I'd suggest Kon had taken some serious inspiration from Lynch's muddled and underwhelming film. Kon takes this Lynchian style and runs with it, the innocuous opening slowly developing into a bizarre and vividly violent psychological thriller that dissects the foundations of Japan's most prominent 'star machine' - the pop idol 'scene'. The absurd amount of pressure the industry places on its young stars and starlets, from the agents and managers looking for big money any way they can to the fans that react aggressively to any divergence from the squeaky-clean perfection they demand, is taken to disturbing extremes, and the comprehensiveness of the way the film critiques the scene gives the already-gripping thriller some satisfying depth. The animation isn't always up to scratch, at times looking downright ugly and oddly-drawn, and the big reveal feels like it undermines the good work of the film up to that point in its critique of J-pop constructs and the position of women in contemporary Japanese media, but there's a lot to chew on here, and it's all packaged in a whirlwind of a thriller, filled with choice setpieces (the parking lot sequence, hell yes) and backed by a menacing, throbbing soundtrack.

- Pigeon Army

390. Porphyria’s Lover

by Robert Browning Poem 1836

Last Year's Position: New Entry

Intense poetic monologue about a man who strangles his beloved with her own hair. Some read the poem as a man beating an illness, personified in the form of the lover. But that doesn't really explain the poem's final challenge to God.

Despite a shaky start, this series about demon-hunting brothers Sam and Dean Winchester soon turned into one of the most entertaining shows on television. Sadly, like many American series, it's been dragged out beyond its own natural end point. Seasons 2 - 4 are joyous though, especially season four's Wishful Thinking episode.

A story of unease and a sense of lingering dread, Where Are You Going... focuses on Connie, a 15 year old girl who likes to think of herself as more sophisticated than her surroundings. One day, while home alone, she's visited by two strange men. Arnold Friend and his companion. They try to convince her to take a ride with them, alternating between seductive and threatening. Inspired by a series of murders committed by Charles Schmid, Where Are You Going is taken further into the horror genre by the suggestions that A. Friend is a far more Devilish character than he first appears.

I haven't read this, but it's either a graphic novel described as the story of a painter who creates art out of his own blood in a post-apocalyptic world, or the title of Gimli's list of favourite films and music.

A drama critic and writer many a book dismissing marriage, Mortimer Brewster (Grant), has finally fallen in love and gotten married to the girl next door, Elaine Harper (Priscilla Lane) He visits his elderly aunts and their brother Teddy (Who thinks he's Theodore Roosevelt), to tell them the good news. While there he makes an unsettling discovery, a corpse hidden in a window-seat. Believing it to be the work of Teddy, he tells his aunt that he will have to be sent to an asylum, only to be told the truth by his adorable but insane relatives, they murdered the man in the window-seat, and he wasn't the first. They've been poisoning lonely bachelors in an attempt to end what they feel is their misery and burying the bodies in the cellar. The arrival of Jonathan, Mortimer's more criminal, brother (Massey) creates further chaos. Jonathan is a psychotic gangster, on the run from the cops and trying to dispose of his latest corpse, and he's brought his alcoholic plastic surgeon (Lorre) along for the ride. Mortimer has to try and avoid being murdered by Jonathan while alerting the local cops to his danger, think of a way to cover up for his aunts and Teddy's activities, as well as keep Elaine away from danger, all the while worrying that the madness that afflicts the rest of his family will take a hold of him too.

Just reading that synopsis back to myself and it sounds like this is an incredibly dark film, more like a film Grant would have made with a director like Hitchcock rather than Capra. But don't be fooled, Arsenic is a classic farce and one of the funniest comedies ever to come out of Hollywood. Make no mistake, the humour is black and incredibly macabre, maybe surprisingly so when you consider the environment it would have been made in. Farces sometimes don't translate well to cinema, that kinetic energy that's needed to pull it off on stage can sometimes seem stilted and false on camera, thankfully Arsenic And Old Lace avoids that pitfall, thanks in no small part to the amazing cast.

Despite some critical negativity towards his performance, I always thought Grant commanded the show and the film just wouldn't work without his sheer manic energy. There's a shot late in the film where the house is in chaos and Grant, nearing breaking point just sits down on the stairs and takes it all in. This rare calm moment from Grant in this film, where the hysteria in his mind plays out across his face rather than his whole body, demonstrates not just why he was possibly the greatest comedic actor of all time, but why he was one of the most interesting and underrated actors ever to step in front of a camera.

That's not to knock any of the support, while I wish I could have seen the original stage actor, Boris Karloff, in the Jonathan role, Massey does some top-notch work. Lorre manages that peculiar trick of his of being both creepy and sympathetic, sometimes in the same moment. The strongest of the support performances come from the wonderful Josephine Hull and Jean Adair as his aunts, two gentle, sedate, charming women, who just happen to have poisoned numerous men and buried them in the basement.

Arsenic... has a huge place in my heart because it's the first Cary Grant film I ever saw. It started a lifelong love, not just of Grant's films, but of screwball comedy in general. I owe this film so much, and while I think there are greater Grant films and greater screwball comedies, Arsenic will always be among my favourite films.

Laura Dern plays Nikki, an actress hoping to land a role in a film called On High in Blue Tomorrows. A creepy woman, played by Grace Zabriskie, comes to her home and claims to be her neighbour. Zabriskie insists that Dern has won the part, then she tells a creepy little story about a boy who opened the door and saw the end of the world. She also talks of time mixing together. Dern gets the part, opposite playboy actor Theroux, and the director, Kingsley (Irons) tells them it's a remake of a German film that was unfinished because of stories of a curse that killed the two leads. Nikki's world begins to merge with the film and the possibility of a curse seems more real with each strange new event. Reality and fiction mix together until we're unsure if we're seeing real events happening to Nikki or if we're seeing the part she's playing in the film. Multiple subplots run wild through the film. A group of prostitutes party in a house on the set, Polish prostitutes meet men who degrade them, a strange woman talks of a desire to murder, and the most popular tv show is about a family of humanoid rabbits who could have walked out of one of Beckett's oddest plays.

So it's fair to call Inland Empire a surreal experience. If you boil the plot (?!) down you basically have a psychological thriller about a woman having a nervous breakdown while making a film. Or about a prostitute having a breakdown and imagining she's an actress. Or it could be about doppelgangers and alternate realities, the influence of Maya Deren's Meshes is obvious here. The way Dern doubles is reminiscent of Deren's film and it evokes the same sense of dread of the unknown. Or it might just not matter that much what it's actually about. It's broken record time here but whoever decided we need to be able to clearly understand a film to appreciate it should have been strangled at birth. We can pull out allegories from the film of Hollywood as a place haunted by ghosts of the past, we can see comparisons between the fake glitz of Hollywood and the ghettos some of the characters inhabit. We can even see indications of the performer as whore. But I don't think any of those are the main idea we're meant to take from this film. It actually feels like a stream-of-consciousness work, as if Lynch just allowed himself to follow his instincts and Dern trusted him with it all the way. Speaking of Dern, she puts in a career best turn, a bold, uncompromising performance that puts most working actresses to shame.

The truth is I expect most people to find Inland Empire a sprawling self-indulgent mess, and I don't really care. I don't understand it all, nor do I pretend to. I have ideas but unless Lynch actually offers a detailed explanation that's all any of us can have. So if you take away any sense of clarity, what I think you're left with is a hallucinatory, mind-bending, harrowing tale of identity, hysteria and performance that asks us to think about the nature of reality and fiction. But ultimately it's a puzzle constructed in Lynch's mind, and it's one of the most ambitious and audacious films I've seen him create.

One of the greatest songs ever written. It's about Mick seeing a lot of black cars and really wanting one, then buying one second hand only to find out one of the doors was a cheapy replacement and didn't match the others. Awesome stuff.

Niki Jumpei is an entomologist on vacation in a remote region of Japan. He's collecting specimens from the insect population in the hopes of discovering a new species. He misses the last bus home and is offered shelter by a poor village. He is taken to a sand dune where a rope ladder leads him down to a house, in the house he meets a young woman who gives him food and shelter for the night. He finds out that her job is to shovel sand while digging for a water supply, the sand is then removed by the locals and sold illegally, in exchange the locals give her food and water. He also finds out her family were killed by the sand. In the morning he finds the rope ladder gone and himself trapped with the woman and ordered to help her, in exchange he gets sexual favours from her as well as food and water.

So if you haven't seen it then this film probably sounds like just another weird entry in my list and it would be foolish to deny that the film falls firmly into the category marked 'odd'. But it's so much more than that. Woman of the Dunes has an offbeat and timeless feel that lifts it above being mere oddity and into the realms of a genuine classic. For a start, despite its at times dreamlike aura, it's one of the most extraordinarily physical films ever made, the contrast between the shifting sands and the lovers bodies contains more intense eroticism than most pornographic movies could ever dream of. Add to that the unrelenting and oppressive feel of the film brought about by the claustrophobia of the ever-shifting sands, sands that have so much life and presence to them that they nearly become a character in their own right.

The film also has an existential quality that places it close to the work of the likes of Kafka or Camus. Teshigahara draws upon the myth of Sisyphus to create an allegory for life and for the effects of capitalism on humans. Niki craves recognition to validate his life, feeling that he can only really be worthwhile once he's achieved something in his chosen field. The villagers just do what they can to survive, the woman's existence is spent shoveling sand, as he asks at one point, is she living to shovel or shoveling to live? It's implied that neither lifestyle is more worthwhile and that they're more similar than the man would probably care to admit. They're both trapped in ultimately futile endeavours, each trying to reach a goal that's probably always going to be beyond them.

The X-Files starred David Duchovny as Agent Fox Mulder, a once brilliant FBI agent whose obsession with paranormal cases has earned him the nickname of 'Spooky' and relegation to the FBI basement as the sole agent working 'The X-Files' a series of cases that defy rational solutions. In the pilot episode, Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) is assigned to work with him in order to debunk his work. Over the course of the seasons, Scully starts to believe in Mulder and his theories and the two find themselves constantly at odds with the higher powers in the bureau.

The series took just three episodes before coming up with its first classic, Squeeze, the show that introduced us to mutant cannibal Eugene Tooms. The episodes with Tooms set the standard for how terrifying the show could be, a standard that managed to be raised with season four's jaw-dropping episode, Home.

The show has so much baggage now that it's difficult to explain just how exciting it was when it first aired. It became a true cultural phenomenon and it actually deserved the high regard and popularity it commanded. Duchovny and Anderson both became international stars and sex symbols and Mitch Pileggi became a cult hero thanks to his performance as FBI director.

Duchovny was to leave the show after season 6 and Anderson increasingly took a smaller role in the episodes. The new leads were Robert Patrick and Annabeth Gish, both fine performers, but they just never had the chemistry of Mulder and Scully.

One of the original Weird Tales. A slave ship captain is bitten by one of the women he's transporting and soon finds the wound is starting to mutate. A brilliantly nasty horror from the master of the voodoo tale.

When Brent turns down Lola's invitation to a school dance, he has no idea of just how determined she can be when it comes to getting her man. With the help of her Daddy, Lola kidnaps Brent and subjects him to a night of torture. What could have been another forgettable entry in the torture porn craze instead becomes one of the most memorable horror films of the last ten years, partly thanks to the great performances, but mostly because the writing is strong enough to make you care about Brent. It's Robin McLeavy as Lola who steals the film though, with a demented performance filled with child-like glee and sudden rages. It should have made her a star.

The attempt to move the classic t.v. show to the big screen wasn't a great success. Dante's update of It's a Good Life is the best of the bunch, along with the entertaining Albert Brooks/Dan Aykroyd starring prologue. The rest of it is average to poor. And that's not mentioning the real-life tragedy that hit the film. Still, what a brilliant prologue.

One of the greatest ghost stories ever written. A governess is hired for a new position, looking after two young children in a country house. When she arrives, she discovers the boy, Miles, has just been expelled from school for some unnamed crime. With their children's guardian, their uncle, wishing to remain distant both physically and emotionally from the children, the governess is in near isolation at the house, with the only other adults being the other servants. She soon starts to hear stories about her predecessor, Miss Jessel, and another servant, Peter Quint. Quint and Jessel had a relationship, and there are hints that they also corrupted the children before dying. With both Flora and Miles beginning to act strangely, the governess starts to see the figures of Jessel and Quint appearing around the grounds. The nature of the ghosts in the story has been hotly debated over the years, with some seeing it as a genuine haunting and others seeing the governess as sexually repressed and prone to fantasy. Over the years, The Turn of the Screw has been adapted several times for cinema, television, radio and even as an opera and a ballet.

The Outer Limits was an anthology series in similar style to The Twilight Zone. Often regarded as more sci-fi than horror based, The Outer Limits still had more than enough horror themed episodes to justify its inclusion here.

Aickman is basically reinventing one of the traditional forms of horror story, a pair of travelers become caught in a storm and seek shelter in an isolated house filled with odd people. But like all of Aickman's tales, The Trains is about so much more than a mere plot synopsis could ever provide. In fact he's one of the most maddeningly ambiguous writers I've ever had the pleasure of reading. Aickman's fiction gives us a world where the rational and the supernatural collide and we don't discover the reasons why. We know the house itself is connected to the railways, but it actually seems to embody them. From door handles reminiscent of signal boxes to the rooms that seem like carriages, and as for the pockets stuffed with tickets, there's a lot of implications can be read into that little touch, even the notion of people waving at old steam trains becomes perverted. Not a writer for every taste, but there's been few better at creating stories that are truly uncanny.

Really wonderful Hollywood ghost story. Set in Cornwall, brother and sister (Milland and the always underused Ruth Hussey)) fall in love with and buy a house on a cliff from straitlaced Donald Crisp. The house comes with a story – a husband and wife, a baby, a lover and a nurse – wife dead, and the child brought up by her grandfather (Crisp). The Fitzgeralds get to know Stella and follow up the story of the house – the cold, the crying at night – and come to realise the strong connection the girl has with her former home.

Immensely creepy and superbly shot, it actually features really effective ghost shots. Interestingly it has 101 Dalmations Dodie Smith attached to the script (maybe to get authentic Britishness in) although I think their real reference was Christie's "The Moving Finger" as the brother/sister protagonists, the young girl and even the sister's interaction with the doctor are almost word for word from that. Add to that a character that is the spiritual successor of Judith Anderson's Mrs Danvers (strong lesbian subtext there, although not as well-played).

Ken Russell's finest film was this adaptation of Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudun. It tells of the fate of Urbain Grandier, a French priest who was accused of witchcraft. In Loudun, the governor has died and left control of the city to Grandier (Oliver Reed). He's a popular man, but doesn't take his duties seriously, indulging in an affair with the sister of another priest. The deformed Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave) has become sexually fixated on him and asks him to take confessions in the convent. When the priest marries another woman, Sister Jeanne is driven to insanity. The Baron de Laudardemont (Dudley Sutton) arrives and is looking to demolish the town. Grandier uses the army to stop him. Father Mignon (Murray Melvin) takes over his confessor duties and Jeanne uses the opportunity to tell him of Grandier's affairs and to accuse him of witchcraft. Mass hysteria overtakes the nuns of the town and a witch-hunter arrives to purge the nuns of their demons, leading to Grandier being arrested and put on mock-trial before the town. This is one of the films that took on an almost mythical quality for me in my early teens so I'll always have a huge affection for the film. I don't think it's as disturbing as many others seem to, in fact it strikes me more as a John Waters-esque orgy of bad taste. It's all incredibly camp, but it's also quite brilliant. There's an incredible sense of spectacle, all played out against Derek Jarman's remarkable sets. There's also powerful performances all down the line, Redgrave and Sutton are stand-outs, but Reed dominates the film, giving the most magnetic performance of his career.

Following an explosion at a mine, coroner Dr. Winters, a man dying of stomach cancer, is brought in to do the autopsy. Winters works through most of the autopsies, before one of the bodies has a surprising reaction, it starts moving. Then things get really weird. To give away the astonishing last section of the story, which combines some of the most disturbing imagery I've ever read in a short story with a true gut-punch of an ending.

La cabina must be the answer to about 90% of the "What's this film?" questions on the internet. It seems to have been a nightmarish film for many who grew up in the 70s and 80s. Made for Spanish TV, La cabina gained notoriety in the UK after being broadcast by the BBC in a couple of late-night showings. This short film could easily have been an episode of The Twilight Zone or Tales of the Unexpected if they'd hired Luis Bunuel as a director.

The premise is unforgettable, a nameless man sees his son off to school and then steps into a phone box, in the middle of a busy street, to make a call. Only once the door shuts, he can't get out again. Passers-by try to help him, but they can't get the door to move. Eventually he's surrounded by spectators, some trying to help, some just wanting to laugh at the situation. Eventually the phone company arrive and even they can't open the door. So they load the phone box onto the back of their truck and take him away. To reveal any more would be far too evil, needless to say the ending is a memorable one.

The short slowly builds from mild amusement to outright comedy to irritation to absolute terror, and Jose Luis Lopez Vazquez does an incredible job running through the emotions. The film is a masterful achievement, a surreal nightmare that can be read as an allegory for isolation in the modern world. I wish I could write more about this wonderful little short, but to say too much about it would spoil the experience.

Superb adaptation of one of James' most frightening stories. Young orphan Stephen goes to live with his only family, the rich but eccentric Abney. Abney seems friendly, and even has a history of taking in stray children. But they never seem to stay for long and they always disappear overnight. Brilliantly creepy, with some of the most memorable imagery of the series, Hurdy Gurdy music has never been so unsettling.

The great Peter Wyngarde, forever a part of cult history for his work as Jason King and his remarkable album, stars in this creepy little tale of witchcraft and the dangers of denying the supernatural. He plays a college professor, Norman Taylor, an expert on traditions and superstitions, who we meet while giving a lecture on witchcraft. He is stating his disbelief of the supernatural and he scrawls some words on the blackboard that he'll later regret, "I do not believe". He learns he may be getting a major promotion, but he soon discovers that the promotion hasn't come through his hard work, but through his wife Tansy's (Janet Blair) interest in witchcraft. In anger, Norman destroys all of her magical items, despite her claims that they were the only things protecting him from evil forces. Norman's life soon begins to fall apart as rival witches start to cast spells on the unlucky couple, he narrowly misses being run down, a student accuses him of rape and her boyfriend pulls a gun on him. But it's when a recording of one of Norman's old lectures, overlayed with an odd noise, is played that things pick up a pace, and we realise Norman's final confrontation with the supernatural is soon to come.

Adapted from Fritz Leiber's classic Conjure Wife, and known as Burn, Witch, Burn on its American release, Night of the Eagle is old-fashioned story-telling at its best. For most of the film we don't get any answers, everything could be in Taylor's head, combined with some nasty coincidences, or there really could be a plot against him. It's beautifully structured and it creates an incredible sense of suspense. It's a film where danger come come from any shadow, and there are never any easy answers. It would make a fantastic double-bill with Night of the Demon or some of the earlier Val Lewton films. Peter Wyngarde and Janet Blair do superb work, with Wyngarde in particular mesmerising as the overly stubborn lecturer who is brought to his knees by unknown powers. Wonderful stuff.

One of the most famous horror stories ever written, it's also one of the very best. The Willows sees two men on a canoe trip down the Danube. They make camp on a little island, only to find that something in their environment doesn't like them, and it may just be the environment itself. A beautifully written nightmare, with the description of the river, and of those sinister willows, being incredibly evocative.

In A Glass Cage opens with a shocking scene of a young boy being tortured by a Nazi doctor named Klaus (Meisner). The boy is naked and suspended from the ceiling by his wrists, he has been beaten and his body is badly bleeding. Klaus, who has been taking photographs of him, kills the boy with a lump of wood before going to the roof and attempting suicide. If that sounds too extreme for you then this is probably the point where you should switch off the film, because it's going to get worse as it goes on. In A Glass Cage is a controversial and deeply disturbing film where sado-masochism and paedophilia are some of the main plot themes. But those expecting cheap trash should look elsewhere, while there are deeply disturbing scenes in the film, it's not exploitation, it's a claustrophobic and intense psychological thriller.

The film picks up later in time, Klaus survived his fall from the rooftop but he's now imprisoned in an iron lung, cared for by his distant wife (Paredes) and his young daughter (Echevarria). A young man, Angelo (Sust) arrives at the house one day and blackmails Klaus into hiring him as a nurse. Angelo witnessed Klaus murdering the boy, he concealed the crime but he also stole Klaus's diary in which he detailed his downward spiral from wartime experiments to paedophilia and murder. Angelo slowly takes over the house, forming an odd bond with the young daughter, Rena, and isolating the resentful wife, Griselda. By night, Angelo visits Klaus and reads passages from his diary, claiming he wants to follow in his footsteps and restart the abuse and murder. Isolated in the house with Klaus and Rena, Angelo becomes a monster himself, covering the house with barbed wire, he kidnaps a young boy and kills him while wearing Klaus's army uniform, committing more murders as he slips further into insanity. The final reveal about the relationship between Angelo and Klaus is fairly obvious, but that doesn't stop the scenes being any less disturbing. The fate of Rena and Angelo is rather more startling and something I won't reveal here, other than to say that as distressing as it is, I wouldn't really have expected anything else from this film.

The film is very obviously concerned with the nature of power and the effects of power on its victims. Be they victims of fascism, child abuse, murder, or something more innocent like parental power. It's also about the transference of power, Klaus used to have power, now trapped in his coffin-like iron lung he's become a victim, whereas Angelo who used to be the victim now has all the power. Angelo's transformation is uncomfortable, seemingly confirming the stereotypical idea of someone's who's abused becoming an abuser themselves. But this is how the film seems to give redemption to its characters, in order to find peace you have to have to first have the power and then have it removed and become the victim yourself. If this was little more than a portrait of paedophilia and the damage it can cause then I think that would be incredibly simplistic and insulting, but In A Glass Cage is also about the nature of evil itself and the idea than it can infect all those who come into contact with it, even the most innocent. In fact it almost turns the character of Klaus into a kind of vampire, draining the goodness from all those he's come into contact with.

If I've made the film sound exploitative at any point then I haven't done it justice, there is no cheap thrill-seeking here. Its cruelty is almost suffocating, it's full of contradictions, beautiful at one moment and grotesque at the next, coming across as both a dream and a nightmare. It's difficult to watch, and the brilliant but disturbing performances don't help, but if you can make your way through it it will have an effect on you, there's no middle-ground with this film, and that's probably how it should be.

In the film's haunting opening sequence, Joo-yeon's (Oh San-ha) car has broken down on a lonely road on a snowy night. She's waiting for the tow-truck to arrive and take her home, while talking to her boyfriend, special agent Soo-hyun (Lee Byung-hun) on the phone. Kyung-chul (Choi Min-sik) pull up and officers to help with the car. Joo-yeon is naturally worried about taking help from a strange man and politely turns him down, but he's not taking no for an answer. He forces his way into her car and savagely beats her. When next we see her she's naked, chained to the floor in an isolated warehouse, and he's preparing to hack her to pieces. This brutal opening takes up the first ten minutes of the film, and if we think we know how violent and depraved this film will get, we haven't seen anything yet.

When her body is discovered, Soo-hyun takes the news calmly, but at her funeral vows revenge. He takes two weeks off work and sets his plan in motion. Joo-yeon's father is the chief of police and he provides Soo-hyun with details of the four main suspects in the case. One by one, he hunts down the suspects, looking for the guilty man. He brutalises each suspect until he's convinced of their innocence, before finding the proof he needs for Kyung-chul's guilt. He tracks down his man, just as Kyung-chul is about to rape and murder a schoolgirl. Soo-hyun beats him senseless, breaks his arm and... in a typical film, we could fill in those dots easily enough. He goes too far and kills him, then the rest of the film is about Soo-hyun trying to hide the evidence of his own crime. Or he arrest him but the beating is enough to secure Kyung-chul's release. That's what would usually happen, but this is a revenge tale in the best tradition of Grand Guignol, EC Comics and The Pan Book of Horrors, so here, Soo-hyun lets him go. But not before forcing a tracking device down his throat while he's unconscious. Every time Kyung-chul tries to rape and murder, Soo-hyun shows up and deals out yet another brutal beating. What follows is one of the most vicious games of hunter and hunted ever put on film. The morality of the film is interesting. The nature of the beatings inflicted on Kyung-chul makes your sympathy sometimes flip towards him. Ultimately it's impossible to feel anything other than absolute contempt for his character, but Soo-hyun is every bit as much a psychopath as he is. Also, he's willing to endanger more innocents by constantly releasing Kyung-chul and giving him the opportunity to hurt more people.

Many people will tell you this is an action thriller. This is horror through and through. That's not to say there's not some incredible action sequences, the unbelievably tense taxi ride, that suddenly erupts into ferocious violence is remarkable. As is a scene where Kyung-chul and Soo-hyun stalk each other through the corridors of a hotel. But it's not an action-adventure. There's also no attempt at realism here, this is a film where psychopaths lurk around every corner, and where every feverish nightmare you've ever had about those monsters with human faces can come true. That dark and snowy night that opens the film is something right out of a twisted fairy tale, while the hotel that plays host to a Kyung-chul and a few of his equally depraved friends could have Norman Bates or Jack Torrance living in one of the wings. The film is exceptionally violent, but it never feels like it's just torture porn, between the mayhem there's quite a thoughtful take on the nature and price of vengeance. It's not something that overpowers the film, but it's always there, running throughout the film, as we watch Soo-hyun become as big a monster as Kyung-chul, especially by the time we get to the macabre finale. For an instant, as the film was ending, I almost expected the camera to pull back to reveal the Crypt Keeper chuckling away and making a grisly and groan-inducing pun, but instead we get a very different kind of morality lesson.

There was more than one moment that made me wince and want to look away, but the camera never flinches. The moment that made me despair the most was one where there was no on-screen violence, just a warning from a psychopath to a captured girl that she shouldn't put up a fight. The power came from the acting rather than the visuals, and it was all the more stomach-turning because of it.

It's an absolute masterpiece, Kim Jee-woon has created some of the most memorable films of the last decade, but this is his work of art, topped off with two brilliantly intense performances. Hopefully it'll get the level of acclaim it deserves and turn both Kyung-chul and Soo-hyun into nightmare figures.

Beverly and Eliot Mantle (Both played by Jeremy Irons) are both doctors, running a gynaecology clinic together. The seduce the patients who come to the clinic, the more confident twin (Elliot) seduces them and then when he bores of them he passes them on to Beverly. When an uptight actress, Claire arrives looking for help, they begin a strange love triangle. Beverly becomes obsessed with Claire and her abnormal reproductive system, developing delusions about mutant woman, and even having instruments designed to work on these imaginary deformed women. A strange psychological horror/character study, with a career best turn from Irons. Maybe not as overtly horrific as other Cronenberg films, but it has a haunting quality that lingers with the viewer.